What’s in store for employees in 2020? New Enterprise 20/20 ebook chapter looks for your input

How will the enterprise evolve by 2020? What role will technology play in our day-to-day lives? Enterprise 20/20 – a socially-driven initiative presented by HP and driven by the industry – seeks to address these questions and more.

From the start, we envisioned Enterprise 20/20 as a social endeavor; an initiative that would be shaped by its contributors in sometimes unexpected ways. Just three months into this project, crowd-sourcing is underway in many conversations across the site. One topic in particular has prompted several dozen active contributors to comment again and again in a thread that has been read close to 2,000 times.

The subject is the future of employees, and the opinions are varied and impassioned. Thanks to your input, we are going to add Employee 20/20 to the lineup of ebook chapters that will go live before HP Discover 2012 in December. (The previously scheduled Boardroom 20/20 chapter will be published in 2013 – when we plan to publish version 2.0 of the ebook at Discover Las Vegas – so get in your nominations now!)

This is crowd-sourcing at its best, and we are delighted by the way in which our community members have engaged around a topic that we didn’t make a top priority at the outset.

Along the way, two questions have come up:

How will we handle attributions when we weave community member perspectives into the ebook? When we reference community member comments, we will link to specific threads in the Discussion Hub so readers can see comments in the context in which they were shared. We may also quote some contributors as sources in the chapters, when their comments support or refute a point we’d like to make. In these cases, we may reach out to community members to ask permission to share their names and titles, in addition to their usernames.

When will we update chapters to reflect community input? The answer here depends on the level of activity in the community around the chapter topic. We monitor the Enterprise 20/20 discussion hub daily and plan to revisit the chapters to make updates closer to HP Discover Frankfurt, which takes place December 4-7, 2012.

Now that we’ve made the decision to proceed with Employee 20/20, we need your help. Please join us in taking the next step to define what this new chapter should cover and what it should look like. What hot button issues will shape what it means to be an employee in 2020? For example, we might organize our thoughts around some of these categories, or perhaps we should consider other categories not yet on the list:

Employment. What does working for someone/something else look like or mean in 2020? How will benefits like health insurance and 401K plans change? Will the balance of power be with employees for whom company loyalty means nothing, or will we want to once again work for one company forever? What does the Employee Handbook of 2020 look like? Will unions exist? Will workloads be lighter or heavier? How about pay scales?

Location. Where will we work in 2020? At home? At Starbucks? Commuting to the office where we sit in glass-enclosed cubicles? Will we be able to work virtually anywhere in 2020, or will we still be somewhat tethered? What technologies will enable this change? Will a workday begin in the morning and end at 6 p.m., or will we all be able to work in spurts that are interrupted by attending our kids’ ball games in the middle of the day?

Tools. Today it’s common that your tools at work include a phone, a computer/laptop, printers, copiers, network access, and a cell phone. How will that toolbox change in 2020? What will be the productivity tool of choice and what does this mean for IT? How will printing change—we all thought we’d have a “paperless office” by now. Will that be a reality in 2020? How will documents move from device to device? How will our communication be enabled? Will we still have whiteboards? Virtual rooms? Bridge lines? What will the collaborative canvas of 2020 look like?

Organizations. Will hierarchies disappear in 2020? Or will we be so choked by consensus-building that we crave levels of authority? What new organizational models will emerge?

The boss. How will the relationship between managers and employees change by 2020? What new leadership models might emerge? How will our performance be measured?

We’d like to know what you think. We’re also interested in your graphics, videos, infographics, research, blog topics and even cover art. Let’s continue the conversation, and in a couple of weeks, we’ll distill the feedback into an outline for the chapter.